Thursday 17 July 2014 05.24 EDT
First published on Thursday 17 July 2014 05.24 EDT

In his copy of Livy's history of Rome, the Elizabethan scholar Gabriel Harvey paused to write a note in the margin about how he read the text in the company of Philip Sidney, and how the two had "scrutinis[ed it] so far as we could from all points of view, applying a political analysis, just before his embassy to the emperor Rudolf II". Over 400 years old, the annotation – a far cry from the biro scribbles and fluorescent highlighting of today but giving just as intimate an insight into the mindset of its author – will form just one small part of a new digital project to explore the margin notes made in 16th and 17th-century texts.

An international collaboration between Johns Hopkins University, the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at UCL (CELL), and the Princeton University library, the project has just received a $488,000 (£285,000) grant from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation and will, said Professor Anthony Grafton of the department of history at Princeton, provide "the chance to stand by the desks of Renaissance scholars and look over their shoulders while they work at their trade. We can watch them read and respond to a vast range of books, tracing their thoughts and glimpsing the ways in which they used their scholarship to advise kings, ambassadors, and archbishops."

To start, the project will consider the more than 400 books annotated by Harvey, running from the middle decades of the 16th century to the early decades of the 17th, transcribing, translating and cataloguing his many annotations and digitising the material to enable it to be shared and searched on a publicly-available website. The academics then hope to move onto the notations of others.

"Even when you pick up a student book in the library today, and it says 'rubbish', it tells you something," said Professor Lisa Jardine, director of CELL. "What you get is what it really means for a human being to read. You read for delight, and you read for information, and you read to decide what you are going to do next. You're looking over a space of however many … years watching this man do these things. It really is bringing him completely back to life."

In another of Harvey's books, a copy of Niccolo Machiavelli's Arte of Warre from 1573, the scholar makes a note beside a passage in which Machiavelli has written that: "Men, yron, money, and bread, bee the strength of the warre, but of these first foure, the first two be moste necessarye because men and yron, finde money and breade, but breade and money men and yron."

"Harvey seems really interested to memorise these four components of Machiavelli's formulary, and to do so, he cross out 'yron' and 'bread', changing them in manuscript so all four begin pnemonically with the letter 'm': 'men, munition, money, and meat', and places a note at the end of the sentence, 'Mmmm'. I can't help but laugh inwardly at the thought of Harvey uttering a satisfactory 'Mmmm' to himself after such a clever manipulation of the text," said the project's principal investigator, Dr Earle Havens, the William Kurrelmeyer curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Sheridan Libraries.

The team on the project, known as The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe, believe that the material they will be studying is among the largest, least accessible and most underused of original manuscripts from the period, because the annotations are almost entirely uncatalogued. The software they will be using allows them to document and share the material properly for the first time.

"There are so many parallels between our project, and the digital world of information that we live in today," said Havens. "These notes reveal a largely unvarnished history of personal reading within the early modern historical moment. They also embody an active tradition of physically mapping and personalising knowledge upon the printed page. The added practice of referencing and cross-referencing other works in these marginal annotations also allows us, like those early readers, to engage with the presence of 'virtual libraries' within the space of a single book."